


Life is Sweet

by Schwoozie



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alexandria Safe-Zone, Angst, Beth Lives, Brain Damage, Dark Beth, Disturbing Themes, Dubious Consent, F/M, Self-Destruction, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-24
Updated: 2016-01-11
Packaged: 2018-04-23 05:43:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4865255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schwoozie/pseuds/Schwoozie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beth came back wrong and she knows it. She doesn't need to be reminded by everyone else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This work's main inspirations are dynamicsymmetry's "Safe Up Here With You" and season 6 of Buffy.
> 
> Basically, not a happy ride.
> 
> Enjoy! ^^

> _I tell you life is sweet,_    
>  _in spite of the misery_
> 
> _\- Natalie Merchant_

 

They don't let her hold Judith.

She suspects it was a decision made unilaterally, behind her back. No one ever mentions it, the way they clutch the baby—going on toddler, now—tighter whenever Beth walks into the room. She hasn't been warned away. Not in words.

It isn't like she'd want to hold it anyway. Feels a thrum of disgust at the thought of handling something so small and sticky and helpless.

She takes a job on the wall. It's the compromise she makes with Maggie; she'd rather be in one of the groups ranging into the woods, setting traps and patrolling for people, peaceful or not. But Maggie nags at her, day and night and eventually even in the horror of Beth's dreams and Beth gives in so suddenly she's beyond earshot before the group starts speaking again.

Speaking about her. Always about her. Their broken doll.

She's useful on the wall, she does admit. Only a few people in the community have any skill with a bow, and none of them have big sisters with sticks up their asses, so they tend to go far afield. With her bow Beth can kill from the wall as well as patrol it; and at the end of every day when she goes out to collect her arrows, she can look to the west and dream of leaving. Going somewhere.

Not back to the hospital. Not to the farm, or the prison. Not somewhere the walls know her.

Not somewhere she's followed by petty little whispers, either. Not somewhere that people look at her like she's killed someone, everyone they know. Not somewhere she feels like an outsider even inside herself.

She always goes back, in the end. Has her time for wishing and leaves it behind as she's left so much else, beyond the wall; leaves it and returns to her perch for the final job of the day.

With winter coming, they don't range as far as they used to. Stick within a day's travel, two at most, looking more for supplies than people at this point. That, Beth is glad of; that, she can use. No more wailing babies or crippled old women or men who look at her like she's something to be hunted, as if she doesn't know exactly where to cut for them to bleed out in moments—food. Medicine, blankets, weapons. Weapons most of all. Being on the wall gives Beth first pick of everything and she takes exactly and as much as she wants.

What are they going to do? Stop her?

Once when she's picking out cartons of condensed milk, she feels Rick watching her. He does that a lot. They all do, but few more than him. Like he's searching for something in her, something he's forgotten in himself, something he can recognize.

“The kids need some too, Beth.”

 _Fuck the kids,_ Beth thinks. _Fuck the kids and fuck their parents and fuck_ you _, Rick Grimes, for thinking I should care._

She doesn't say anything, though, because he's here too.

He isn't looking at her. He's doing his job, unloading crates, distributing supplies to the ones who need it most. Some nights he grabs a can of fruit and a cup of watery coffee and heads right back out again, to check his snares and the outside of the wall for breaches.

This place will never feel like hers. She doesn't think it feels like his either.

She could take her haul and go home with it, but she doesn't. She climbs to the top of the wall in the fading light, bags of supplies surrounding her, and sits with her legs dangling off the platform, only her palms and the edge of her butt there to hang on. She sits.

She sits and she waits for him to come home.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beth remembers her arrival to the Safe Zone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has read and commented :) This is for you.

She arrived to tears and jubilations and more human contact than it felt like she'd had in years. Decades. She flinched back at first but she endured it; she had to, and not just for their sakes. She didn't lose everything when the bullet tore through her brain. She didn't lose memories and faces and associations.

Not even affect, not really. She remembers how she used to love hugs—would have hugged everyone she came across, if she could.

It wasn't just about tactile comfort, for her; she did it for what the other person got out of it. Hugging someone, and feeling the world slipping from their shoulders; hugging Maggie, her father, him... him most of all, really.

Like so many things, him most of all.

She remembers those feelings, but she doesn’t feel them now. Didn’t feel them when Maggie dragged her to her knees in a suffocating embrace that Beth just barely kept herself from slicing her way out of. Didn't enjoy it when Rick hugged her tight and kissed her cheek, didn't feel it as she was passed from Carol to Carl and back again. She slumped there silently like a horse about to bolt and she stared at him.

She'd still been in Maggie's arms when he raced into the street, crossbow raised and ready to face the commotion.

 _How strange it must be,_ Beth remembers herself thinking, _to hear cries of joy again_.

She saw him come out of the houses like they had once come from the woods, bursting as if through clenching vines, entire body thrumming and jumping with power and intent and urgency. He was more weapon than man, at that point, so intense was his gaze as it flickered through the crowd, drawing information, lowering his guard at what he found. She saw every moment of it happen as if she were merely feet from him and not yards; as if they were as close as they had been in that hallway.

She didn't feel anything when he finally picked her out of the crowd. She didn't feel anything when his eyes caught on her face and everything inside him seemed to _empty_ , spilling to the street like intestines from his gut and leaving his vacant body to stumble against the building, crush his crossbow between himself and the brick. He didn't seem to notice the pain his arm was in, which Beth estimated was something great. He looked at her like he had been crushed beneath a mountain; like a man who had crossed the desert and finally lain down to die.

She felt nothing.

The crowd seeped and swelled between them, sometimes hiding him, sometimes not, and when revealed he would be blinking rapidly as if attempting to wake himself from a dream. And it was like a dream for Beth, the touch of so many people, the sounds, the colors of civilization, and she sensed a beast rising in her chest, feral and frightening, even dimly to her, and she came to wish a bullet would arc through the air and kill her all over again.

No one cared. No one listened for sounds beyond their own mouths, sights beyond her shadow strong and whole on the ground. They kissed her and embraced her and she put herself away in a room with a box under levels upon levels of concrete, alone, dry, quiet.

Safe.

“Daryl. Daryl, look. Look who it is.”

She flickered a little back to life at that name; pressed her ear to the wall, listened, crawled to the telescope to the outside world and peered through.

The crowd had parted, and like the road to Canaan between the walls of the ocean, the break guided her eyes straight to him.

There was something new flickering in his eyes as the gaze of the crowd fell on him, pulled him in with its indrawn breath. Beth didn't have the energy to decipher that flickering, nor the interest; but still she held onto it. Held her own breath, to see what he would do.

He pushed off from the wall, only shaking a little. His crossbow hung limply at his side. His back was straight and his eyes a solid wall of storm as he stole their breaths and walked away with them.

The crowd was silent, blessedly silent, and Beth took the opportunity to push herself off the ground, and in standing caught one more glimpse of him as he rounded the corner and was gone.

It remained a blur after that. Getting her housed, getting her cleaned, treating her like a doll needing polish and primping and care. She held her tongue through most of it, averted her eyes, longed for them to leave so she could curl herself in a ball and touch her scars and think of dying.

They did leave, eventually. She did think about dying, eventually.

She thought about seeing the MRI of her own skull, her own brain, the path the bullet carved through it like a railroad through the wilderness. She thought about coming upon children's corpses and retching. She thought about coming upon children's corpses and taking the knives they had brandished so uselessly. She thought about herself as a corpse, what it was like to be dead. What it still was.

She thought about the sea, and she thought about it parting, and she thought about him. She thought about his gaze, steady on her while all else wavered. She thought about him seeing her, _seeing_ her, and walking away.

Curled into a ball, touching her scars, thinking of him.

She felt something, then.

She felt gratitude.

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beth and Daryl share a walk home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who has read and reviewed :)

Her shoulders always relax when she sees him come back through the gates and sometimes she'll stay and watch the sun finish setting and sometimes she'll walk home with him.

She gets the sense that he walks with her whether she wants him to or not. She isn't as good as he is out in the wild, not yet, but she's learning; she learned, in those months on her own, how to know when she's being stalked. And she thrills to it, a little, that sense of predation, so different from the hovering gazes she is used to. _Drink this, wear that, remember to eat and take care of yourself and why don't you brush your hair Bethy you look so pretty with your hair down Beth, I bet she used to be a pretty girl before she got fucked in the head she isn't fucked in the head she ain't right Maggie you know she'll get better we'll get her better she just ain't the same we'll fix her—_

She feels like prey either way, but at least this kind is honest. Based on the gaze alone; on stealth and skill and his eyes like laser beams in the darkening streets, her own steps growing quieter and quieter until she could be floating, bourn up like some son of God on the water.

_Don't you believe in God anymore, Bethy? He brought you back. He brought you back to us. Isn't that a miracle?_

_That's no miracle,_ Beth thinks. Doesn't say, but thinks.  _No one brought me anywhere. Not you, not Him. Not you._

She doesn't say.

She walks with him.

He's quiet, very quiet as they walk, and she watches his feet that glide so silently across the pavement, tries to match her shorter stride to his.

He doesn't look away because he doesn't look at her to begin with.

She likes that. She likes that he isn't the negative space of an aborted conversation; that she doesn't feel the force of his remembrance pressing in on her skin until her bones pop through her pores.

She suspects he remembers her. She knows he does. She remembers him, sometimes, the way one remembers a face they saw weeks past in the crowd. No distinctive features, no reason to recall; but once this man was something to her and now his nothingness is a comfort.

“I made Maggie cry again,” Beth says.

She feels his glance on her, but that's all it is, a glance; by the time she's turned he's turned away.

“What'd you do?” Daryl asks.

Beth shrugs. “Told her I shot a walker that looked like Daddy.”

Daryl is quiet for several moments. Beth can almost hear the gears turning in his head. Not to temper what he's about to say, she doesn't think. He's never been careful with his words, but he's careful with his thoughts. Beth wants to know what he thinks.

“Couldn't'a been him,” he finally says. “Body don't work without the head. Michonne got him anyway.”

“That's what I said,” Beth says, rolling her eyes. “She's such a drama queen.”

They've come to the houses now: across the street from each other, Daryl on the left, Beth on the right. They stand in the middle of the road facing each other and Beth is used to people avoiding her gaze but Daryl refuses to even blink.

“She misses him,” Daryl says.

His voice is rougher than usual, softer, the way she remembers from the kitchen that night. The candles had felt so warm on her skin, stealing into the sleepiness behind her eyes as her dreams of a full stomach were fulfilled. She'd been surprised how large Daryl made their portions; her portion, specifically, but she didn't complain. She remembers strange cramps in her stomach as she looked across the feast of cola and pig's feet and him standing at the head of it, ready to do anything for her. Everything. He has the same look here, in the middle of the road.

But the world's a lot smaller now.

“She shouldn't,” Beth says. “It's easier.”

He blinks at her, then looks away. Not too far off—just to the left of her jaw, moving beyond her shoulder, skittering around her outline like he's tracing her shadow, cutting her profile from a piece of cloth.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, it's easier.” He shifts his crossbow on his shoulder, the movement scraping a flake of dried blood from his leather, sending it spiraling towards the ground. “Don't always have a choice, though.”

“No,” she says. “Sometimes you don't.”

Their eyes meet for just a moment before he turns his down, settling it on the black of his boots. He scuffles one of them back and forth, as if to stir up a swirl of dust. They stand on concrete though, not the forest floor, and all he stirs is a scraping on the pavement.

“I...”

“What?” she asks. Her patience is running thin, and she lets it show; he doesn't talk to her like this, like each word is a grasp for some conversation they'd had before, some sentiment she doesn't share now. It makes her spine tingle and her feet itch and she wants to run and she never wants to run from him.

He isn't looking at her, at least; is squinting towards the nearly-set sun, its rays sparkling in his eyes like light off glass.

“Goodnight, Beth.”

And then he's turned around, striding to the lot and up the porch and through the door that shuts with a click.

Beth waits for the light to go on in his room before she turns around herself. She knows he'll look out after her, and she wants him to see her go inside too.

There's symmetry there. Balance. No jagged edge, no room to question, to judge.

Just the sight of his back, the sight of hers, walking away.

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maggie asked Beth a question. It wasn't the right one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **WARNING:** There is some really disturbing imagery here, as well as talk of rape. Please take caution before reading.

A week after Beth arrived Maggie asked if she'd been raped and Beth laughed in her face.

It took a while for Beth to stop. Long before then tears were on her cheeks and the entire room was looking towards them, where she sat with Maggie on the couch. It was after one of their weekly dinners— _family dinners_ , with squash and canned corn and an actual chicken from the safe zone's coop—when everyone was sitting around, lazy with glut, stomachs bulging the way they do when those used to nothing suddenly find themselves in abundance. Beth wasn't hungry to begin with but Maggie watched each bite like a hawk, and so Beth ate, keeping her eyes on Daryl's sparse plate to pretend that her ribs would still be sticking out by the end of this.

She likes her body now. It was the one nice thing about washing up that first night: standing before the body-length mirror, head tilted as she took in this person who looked like her. She hadn't changed clothes in weeks and never touched herself and seeing herself in the mirror was like waking into a new skin.

Bones like tree branches draped with parchment. Skin sunken and sallow, bulging in places she wouldn't expect; the flex of her biceps, lean lines of her thighs. Chest almost flat as a boy's but nipples still standing tall in the chill air. She touched one with just the tip of a finger and jerked like the touch had been a bullet.

She took up the house's hot water sitting on the floor of the tub and getting off again and again. She didn't stop until the water ran cold and Maggie came to check on her and she finally got around to scrubbing herself.

She thought about Daryl. She didn't stop herself from thinking about Daryl. She thought about his hands, his hands on her, his hands stripping the skin from a snake pink and shining and how those hands would look around her thigh, his cock, yanking at his flesh until it flushed an angry red and leapt out to meet with hers. Thought about his back and his shoulders and the wings that unfurled in her dreams of him before she lost the ability to dream, how they wrapped around her or bore her away or cocooned the two of them in a nest of down so thick her cunt made puddles amongst the feathers, feathers that shuddered and shivered and entered her too until she was too large for herself to contain, stuffed full, his hands and his eyes and his back and his silence and the bullet between her eyes and the corpses at her feet, knives still in their hands, dolls still in their hands, their hands lying feet away from the jagged stumps of their wrists and the arms stripped down to the bone, and she thought of Daryl fucking her with those dead child fingers and she came apart under her own hands.

Maggie asked if she had been raped and she laughed. Laughed harder when Carol asked what was so funny, laughed and laughed as Maggie left the room, laughed until her chest ached and her grunts sounded more like sobs.

She ended with her head between her knees, breathing ragged, the ringing silence of the room the only sound in her head as she battled to calm the war drum of her heart. She waited for someone to touch her, to say her name. She waited for another's breath to join her own.

She looked up and they were gone.

She sat quietly for many minutes, the way she'd gotten used to—breath shallow, heart slow—eyelids drooping as she wasted time until the world was ready to kill her again.

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All she wants is to feel something.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: This chapter contains a violent sex scene that, due to Beth's mental state, has elements of dub-con. Please read carefully <3

He takes her from behind in an alley.

It's the alley beside the house she lives in, a house currently alive with enough noise and chatter that Beth can barely hear the smacks of his balls against her ass. She can't hear his grunting either, but that's because his head is high up, reared away from where he holds her face to the garbage can lid. Her own panting is loud in her ears, pounding like a drum or the can against the wall or his hips against hers as he pummels her with his considerable strength.

He isn't gentle with her, and she asked him not to be. Told him when she walked up to him at the party, lingered at his elbow till he asked what she wanted and she told him.

To be taken. Owned, used. Held down and fucked so she'll feel it in the morning. In her body if nowhere else.

It hurts. She wouldn't be surprised if she's bleeding, it hurts so bad. She hadn't been dry but she was dry enough that his initial entry felt like sandpaper dragging through her insides, and even as she lubricates it only hurts worse as he goes on. Her gasps are reflex and arousal and the echo of bruises as he fists his hand in her hair and drags her up and then they're moving, shoving the trash can aside and slamming into the wall and scraping her cheek against the brick.

She chose him for this, for the cruelty she knows is in him. Chose him because he'd make it hurt.

“You like that, bitch?” he asks, voice thin and haggard and dry as her cunt, “God, you're so fucking nasty, fucking whore, you'd take anything I give you, huh?”

Beth doesn't give an answer; couldn't manage much of one through her chattering teeth, her jaw pressed to the wall and mouth gaping open as she struggles to breathe. He takes it out on her body; gropes a breast, smacks her ass, shoves her face against the wall until an involuntary cry leaps from her lips.

“You wanted this,” he hisses. “You asked for this, _you_ , god, the fuck'd your fucking sister say—“

“Give you a fucking medal.”

He fists his hand in her hair again and yanks it back and slams her cheek into the brick.

“The fuck'd you say?”

Beth moans, now—loud and involuntary because it hurts and she's crying and she  _ can't fucking feel it _ .

“Fucking cock sucker, come on,” she slurs through her aching jaw, “Come on, fucking fuck me, please goddamn it, _please–“_

And she's pleading and crying and throwing her hands back to urge him faster and it still isn't enough, it isn't enough, he's big and fat and heavy inside her but the bullet was the same and like his cock it cuts like ice.

“Please,” she whispers.

“Fucking _cunt–_ ”

She doesn't have to tell him not to empty inside her; whines as he rips away, clutches the wall as he strips his cock, grunts, moans, splatters bands of cum across her bare ass and the small of her back and her pulled-up dress. She feels it drip and she knows the panties around her ankles will be soaked in it too.

Beth bends her head, pants. Presses her forehead to the wall, feels the warm wet of her blood. Tries not to shake too visibly.

“This won't happen again,” Beth says.

“Didn't expect it to.” He slaps her ass again; spits on her for good measure. “Jesus, you're a good ride, though. _Jesus_.”

“You're welcome.”

She hears him stuffing himself back into his pants; the snap of his waistband, the snick of his zipper. He doesn't try to help her into her clothes and she doesn't ask him to.

“You're a fucked up chick, you know that?” he asks. “A real fucked up chick.”

He leaves, boots crunching in the gravel. Beth unsticks herself from the wall. Looks at the drops of blood she left behind, her cheek, her hand. Looks down at her torn dress and soiled underwear and slowly sinks to the ground.

She's smiling. She dirty and she's bleeding and she's smiling.

She's still smiling minutes later when Daryl finds her and leads her home.

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beth's been hurt, she's hurt herself, and as always Daryl is there to right her. But how much is she going to hurt him in return?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Much tamer than the last chapter, but still, deals with content that could be triggering. Please read carefully.
> 
> Let me know what you think :)

His house is empty. They're all at the party, after all, soaking in company and good cheer. Asking about each other's rose bushes. Swapping recipes. Sharing the hope that it might not rain.

Beth walked on her own all the way across the street, but when she reaches the couch she collapses, body going boneless as she slumps into the arm, winces vaguely when she hits her scraped cheek.

She's smiling and chuckling softly and when Daryl's groin and hips and waist fill her vision she giggles even louder.

“Beth,” he says. “ _Beth_.”

He crouches down and she stops laughing. Her smile doesn't slip, but she doesn't want to laugh anymore.

He looks distressed, she thinks. It's strange on a face that's trained itself to show so little. She thinks about touching his cheek, smoothing the lines between his brows, but her entire body feels disconnected from her brain and she can't find it in herself to move.

“You...” He says. He shakes his head. She notices that he's shaking a little, almost as much as she is; the hand he raises even more so, hovering in an aborted reach for her arm. “You... _Beth_.”

“You can say it,” she says; mumbles, her throat dry from heavy breathing, aching like she'd taken the man from the party there too. Not that she knows what that feels like; she'll try that, next time.

Daryl is still staring at her like some giant beast has ripped through a suit made of her skin and crouches on the couch before him.

“Say what?” he asks. Manages.

“Say I'm a slut. _Messed up_ ,” she sing-songs, giggling again. “I know you think it. Everyone thinks it.”

“I don't think that,” Daryl says. He's looking her over now, following the lines of her blooming bruises, the place where blood is still seeping from between her legs.

“What're you thinking, then?” Beth asks, genuinely curious; then curious about herself, why that's so.

“I...” He shakes his head again, squeezes his eyes shut. He pitches forward, forehead pressing to the couch inches from Beth's hand, and she's filled with the unfathomable urge to touch him.

So she does.

Pets him like a dog at first; little glancing pats against a scalp suddenly rigid, pinched in shock. She likes how he feels under her palm, hair oily and lank, reminding her of her own before they made her bathe. She wants to feel more of it so she slips her fingers between the strands. She scratches at his scalp a little and everything in him seems to relax, leaving his body in a breathy moan.

“You want to fuck me too,” she says.

He's silent for a moment, then snorts, speaking still from his bowed position.

“I dunno what I want from you, Beth. I dunno.”

“Why're you here, then?”

He raises his head. Slowly enough that she knows he doesn’t want her fingers dislodged. She leaves them in his hair, sliding down to scratch behind his ear.

“Beth. Where the fuck else would I go?”

She thinks for a moment, then giggles, squeezing at his scull. “No one wants you either,” she says.

A small smile crawls across his mouth, and he closes his eyes, exhales.

“No. Not like this, no.”

“They're scared of us,” Beth whispers. “We ain't like them. Don't do what they expect, what they want.” Beth closes her eyes, fingers his hair. “I wanna fuck everyone,” she says, voice soft and musical. “Everyone everyone everyone. You can help me.”

“I ain't helping you do that, Beth.”

Her hand tightens in his hair until he winces. She opens her eyes, glares.

“Thought you didn't think I was a slut.”

“I don't–, Beth, fuckin' _look_ at you.” He does touch her this time, fingertips drifting across her scraped cheek. A hiss bursts from between her teeth, and he withdraws, but not far; seems unable now to keep from touching her, sliding his hand down her arm until he's cupping her wrist loosely, thick fingers enormous against her bird bones. “Guys who do this... they don't always stop.”

“So?”

His body deflates as the breath leaves him, sinking by inches until he's nearly as small as she is. She tilts her head as he looks at her, fascinated by how wide his eyes can go when he forgets himself.

“You wanna prove all of them right?” he asks, so quietly she has to lean forward to hear. “Wanna prove _me_ right?”

“Bout what?”

“You'd'a been better off never coming out of that bathroom.”

“I would'a.”

She's just beginning to close her eyes again when he slaps her.

It isn't a hard slap—especially not from him—and it lands on her uninjured cheek, and something about the equalizing sting, both sides sharp and jagged and red, makes something loosen inside of her.

She looks at him. His eyes are blazing and he's up on his knees, braced on her thighs as he glares at her, jaw working up and down. Beth blinks and he doesn't and she thinks his grip on her legs will bruise too.

“What do you _want_ , Beth?”

She doesn't think—not like she used to, not like people do when they say the word.

She sits. She looks at Daryl. At the fading flush of rage in his cheeks. At his trembling lips, the way his beard vibrates along with it. At his eyes, so much wider than they usually are, unmoving from her own. At the lock of hair hanging in his eyes. She wants the hair of out the way so she moves it, sweeping his bangs to the side.

When the words come, they come as a whisper into the world; spoken like a secret she wants to keep from herself:

_I want to be someone._


End file.
